BPM for Marketing

I have just recently talked with a few clients about using BPM technology in the marketing area. As one put it, this is the one of the last bastions where companies look at process.

That being said, there are lots of opportunities for process management within marketing:

Most marketing groups are involved with new product development. One of the most popular product development methodologies is Stage-Gate. Stage-Gate provides an approach for evaluating products with multiple checkpoints. This can easily be managed via BPM and the company even licenses the process to BPM vendors.

A lot of marketing groups use internal and external resources to deliver on projects. This process could use a tool to manage workloads, track status, and share documents.

The advertising process is filled with ongoing dialog and sharing of information. You can’t always put a process on the creative steps, but you surely can automate and eliminate some of the paper surrounding bidding, creative templates, knowledge sharing, and refinement of the end product.

The entire MRM (Marketing Resource Management) space could be served by BPM. MRM basically is a project / process management approach for marketing specific tasks. There are numerous vendors providing COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf Software) for this.

From what I have seen (and my experience in marketing), this has been an area slow to adopt technology and not on the radar for BPM discussions. So, internally and externally, you may want to engage your CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) and bring them up to speed on BPM.